DEFENDING THE SQUIGGLE….Daniel Davies defends the “squiggle,” CNN’s real-time plot of reactions from their focus group of undecided voters during presidential debates:
My only complaint about the crawler is that CNN removes it from the screen when the debate finishes. I absolutely wish that they continued to show the favourable/unfavourable reactions of the dial-testing focus group to the talking heads on the news afterwards; you’d be able to see the worm plunging every time Wolf Blitzer opened his gob. I suspect a few uncomfortable home truths would arise out of that one.
He’s got a few other ideas for on-screen dial testing too. Oddly enough, though, I’m tired of the squiggle. For the first three debates I was fascinated by it even though I knew it was mostly just BS, but in the fourth debate I hardly watched it at all. It wasn’t anything deliberate, I just didn’t care. Short attention span, I guess.